By Malathi Nayak
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Verizon Communications Inc will launch a trial version of its new mobile video service on Tuesday, aiming to prove that telecom players can compete with mobile ad industry titans Google Inc and Facebook Inc.
Verizon said its service, a mobile app dubbed “GO90”, will be offered initially to a select set of its own customers, with advertisements from well-known brands, which it declined to name, but without newly acquired ad technology from AOL, the media company it bought in June for $4.4 billion.
Verizon is targeting young viewers or millennials with about 100 to 200 hours of exclusive content from online video networks such as AwesomenessTV and Machinima, said Brian Angiolet, Verizon’s senior vice president, consumer products. The free service will drive revenue from data usage and targeted advertising.
Verizon’s best chance to prove its advertising potential rests on technology from AOL, which has built tools to deliver targeted Web and mobile ads. That, combined with Verizon’s customer data, should improve targeting, analysts say.
The AOL technology is in the process of being integrated with Verizon’s video service, and targeted advertising tools will be available over time, Angiolet said.
The service will launch officially to all users as soon as later this month, a Verizon spokesman said.
Companies from Netflix Inc to Dish Network Corp already offer Web-based video services through subscriptions, but the No. 1 U.S. wireless company’s ad-supported, short-form video model is unusual.
Go90 pits Verizon against Internet advertising industry heavyweights Google and Facebook, and advertisers will take a “wait and see” approach to determine how many viewers Verizon captures, telecom industry consultant Tim Farrar said.
“Pretty much without exception telecom operators have not been successful as third parties in exploiting the Internet access service, whether it’s video or anything else,” Farrar said. “What percentage of people’s app viewing is going to be over a Verizon app versus YouTube or Facebook…That’s the biggest uncertainty.”
Verizon’s rival AT&T Inc has said it has mobile video services targeting young viewers in the works. Smaller rivals Sprint Corp and T-Mobile US Inc have said they are watching their competitors’ efforts closely.
Verizon is in talks with advertisers and brands about content sponsorships and original-content creation, Angiolet said. The service lets users post comments, form interest-based groups and clip and share videos in social networks, he added.
Verizon’s video strategy “holds genuine promise,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in a recent note. Verizon is currently the only video service to offer advertisers customer data “based on location, at the personal level rather than the household level, with unprecedented knowledge of purchase intent and a wealth of demographic and prior purchase information,” Moffett said.
Verizon’s content portfolio will evolve in coming months, executives have said. Previously, Verizon said its upcoming digital video service will offer content from the National Football League, DreamWorks Animation’s AwesomenessTV unit and Vice Media.
As its trial period begins, content partners include Comedy Central, Food Network, ESPN, Discovery Network and VH1. From the web, it will offer videos from Maker Studios, Machinima and StyleHaul, among others.
(Reporting by Malathi Nayak, Editing by Peter Henderson and Ken Wills)
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Chucky, remind me how you use your Mac Mini. My mom's says her hard drive is about the fail. The fastest thing I can do for her without messing me up is probably just pick up a new one and Time Machine restore to it. Then I take her existing one (late 2012) and as time permits turn it into a little media server or something. Would it also take Time Machine backups on a partition or similar? Hm.
"The fastest thing I can do for her without messing me up is probably just pick up a new one and Time Machine restore to it."
Yeah. For speed, that's the option. But the OWC return option is sensible, if time permits. OWC has always done right by me, and has a great overall reputation. (And if you just move to NYC, Tekserve can do the job well, and at a decent price.)
Also, there is the option of getting an external Firewire drive, preferably SSD, just running the whole damn thing off that, and ignoring the failing internal drive. I can write you a two line AppleScript to automatically unmount the internal drive at startup, so it won't confuse mom. Assuming she's currently got a platter drive in there, Firewire + SSD is much faster.
"Then I take her existing one (late 2012) and as time permits turn it into a little media server or something. Would it also take Time Machine backups on a partition or similar? Hm."
Damn straight. That's real reason to buy her a new one.
It becomes your SAN controller, Plex server, TiVo offline server if you roll that way, backup server, etc, etc.
For Time Machine, yeah. Give TM its own partition. Running TM to a LAN connected Mac is by far the most reliable way to do TM. Just use an external drive for that purpose, in case things go multi-blooey, and you don't want to hassle with fishing the internal drive out in an emergency. Also, best backup practices are to use both TM and cloning. Personally, I wouldn't dream of relying on TM alone. TM can be very flaky, slow and unreliable to restore, and a few other problematic things, though its versioning is its advantage. But cloning is the gold standard for pure backup safety. As far as cloning software goes, SuperDuper! is just fine, but I personally prefer Carbon Copy Cloner.
Feel free to ask more.
I'm pretty crushed for time right now. I wonder if the simplest short term solution is use an external drive. But with a failing or failed drive, do I risk burning the system up? I suppose I can't permanently dismount the drive in software - hence the startup script...
I've pulled the plug on OWC doing the drive replacement - one bonus of the service is they clone the drive. However, it took 30 minutes to start up today and who knows if it'll ever start up again. If I'm doing the data restore, I may as well do the hard drive replacement - I figure maybe 40 mins and it's cleaner than an external drive (cheaper, too).
I picked up an external 1TB USB drive yesterday after work and got her a Time Machine back up as something, versus nothing, and also did a 1-month Crashplan deal for another archive of just files. Most of her most important docs were already backed up, but given the opportunity to grab it all, why not.
If I change Startup disk to external or install a bare drive, I can boot into a sort of BIOS level that has Disk Utility and I can or cannot pull the OS from the cloud? Hm. If I can do OS from cloud, I'd just do specific file restoration from Crashplan as her machine seemed gunked up before this hard drive issue. (Disk Utility says SMART something error can't be repaired, drive will fail soon, back up as much as you can. It's pretty ominous, but I took it at face value.)
Thanks for your help!